LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 

PRESENTED BY 

UNITED STATES OP AMERICA. 




MASSACHUSETTS AND ITS EARLY HISTORY. 



I^ntrotrttctot|) iLmure 



BY 



HON. ROBERT C. WINTHROP. 



KJ. 



INTRODUCTORY LECTURE 



TO THE COIIKSE ON THE 



EARLY HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS, 



BY MEMBERS OF THE MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL SOCIETY, 



^t t\}t iLobjrll Institute, Boston, 



Delivered Jan. 5, 1869. 



/" 



ROBERT C. WINTHROP, 

PRESIDENT OF THE SOCIETY. 




v 



BOSTON: 

PRESS OF JOHN WILSON AND SON. 
1869. 






I 



MASSACHUSETTS AND ITS EARLY HISTORY. 



INTRODUCTORY. 



A N Introductory Lecture, my friends, like an overture to an 
"^ ^ oratorio or an opera, lias, proverbially, a wide scope ; and I 
shall avail myself, with your indulgence, of the largest privileges 
of my position. It is no affectation in me, however, to say to 
you at the outset, that I have little hope of satisfying even the 
reasonable requisitions of the service which has been assigned 
me. I am conscious, indeed, of coming here this evening to 
offer an apology, rather than to deliver an historical lecture. 
Most gladly would I have prepared myself to do something 
worthy of such an occasion, and of such an audience as I see 
before me. Most gladly would I have prepared myself, had it 
been in my power, to deliver something suitable to the position 
which I am called to occupy here, as the President of the old 
Historical Society of Massachusetts, the oldest historical society 
in our country ; which, for more than three-quarters of a cen- 
tury, has devoted itself to the illustration of the Colonial history 
of New England, publishing more than forty volumes of invalu- 
able historical materials, which ought to be in the library of every 
town and village of New England, but which, I am sorry to say, 
have had fewer patrons, or certainly fewer purchasers, than they 
deserved and needed. 

Most gladly, too, would I have prepared myself, had it proved 
to be possible, to say something appropriate and proportionate to 
the great theme of that series of lectures which I am privileged 
to introduce, — the historical merits and virtues of the founders 
and builders-up of this old Puritan Commonwealth, — not second, 



4 MASSACHUSETTS AND ITS EARLY HISTORY. 

certainly, to any Commonwealth beneath the sun, for the influ- 
ence it has exerted upon the ^velfare of the world, and the ex- 
amples it has afforded for the admiration and imitation of mankind. 
Such a theme, I am sensible, deserves and demands the best 
treatment of which any of us are capable. The praises of the 
New-England Fathers should not be feebly uttered. To preface 
a course of lectures on such a subject, and by such lecturers 
as are to succeed me, by any vapid commonplaces, or any mere 
vaporing and boastful panegyrics, were like putting up a lath- 
and-plaster portico to some stately Doric temple, or a facade of 
stucco upon some solid mausoleum of marble or porphyry. 
Better let the structure be, without any facade at all, — as the 
grand Cathedral of Florence, with that majestic dome which so 
roused the emulation of Michel Angelo, has stood for so many 
centuries, — than impair its grandeur, and offend its majesty, by 
any cheap or incongruous frontispiece. There was nothing of 
sham in the character or the conduct of those with whom our 
lectures are to deal ; and nothing of sham should be associated 
with their commemoration. 

Why, then, am I here at all, — seeing that I must needs be so 
reckless of my own rede, and do only what I feel to be so far 
short of my own conception, at least, of what is due to the occa- 
sion ? The answer to this question, my friends, will supply me 
with a subject, and will furnish the substance of the apology 
which I am here to offer you. 

Allow me, at the outset, to recall the circumstances under 
which I first heard of these lectures. It was about the end of 
last January, just as I was leaving the pleasant city of Nice, re- 
cently included in the Empire of France, that I received a kind 
letter from my valued friend. Dr. George E. Ellis, — the original 
proposer of these lectures, and without whom they would not 
and could not have been undertaken, and who is himself to ad- 
dress you next Friday evening on the " Aims and Purposes of 
the Founders of the Massachusetts Colony," — a letter announ- 
cing that such a course was in process of arrangement between 
Mr. Lowell and himself, and suggesting the hope that I might 
return home in season for its opening or its close. I had just 
taken leave of our grand Admiral Farragut, who, throughout that 
eventful circumnavigation from which he has recently returned, 



MASSACHUSETTS AND ITS EARLY HISTORY. O 

made friends for his country, as well as for himself, wherever he 
went ; and the carriage was already at the door, which was to 
bear me along that magnificent Corniche road, — on the very 
brink of the Mediterranean, — of which any one who has ever 
been over it will require no description, while to those who are 
still strangers to its marvellous attractions and its magic beauty, 
no words of others, certainly not of mine, could convey any 
adequate conceptions of them. I drove along this incomparable 
road during three days of delicious weather, and on the fourth 
day entered that superb city which a grander Admiral even than 
Farragut might well have been proud to claim as his birthplace, 

— Christopher Columbus, a native of Genoa. A noble monu- 
ment to Columbus, recently finished, surmounted by a striking 
statue of him, and adorned by a series of bas-reliefs illustrating 
the strange, eventful story of his life, — from which, I need hardly 
say, the Discovery of America was not wholly omitted, — greeted 
us at the gates, with the simple inscription in Italian, " To 
Christopher Columbus from his Country ; " and, as I gazed upon 
it with admiration, I could not help feeling that it was not there 
alone that a monument and a statue were due to his memory, 
but that upon the shores of our own hemisphere, too, there ought 
to be some worthy memorial of the discoverer of the New 
World. I could not help feeling, indeed, how fit it would be, if 
we could have at New York, or in Boston, or at Washington, or 
at Worcester, — under the auspices of our excellent American 
Antiquarian Society, which has taken the supposed date of 
Columbus's discovery as the date of its own anniversary, — an 
exact reproduction of this admirable monument at Genoa, so 
that hemisphere should seem to respond to hemisphere in a com- 
mon tribute to the heroic and matchless old navigator. It would 
be some sort of atonement, I thought, on the part of America, 

— tardy and inadequate, indeed, but better than nothing, — for 
having allowed the name of another, however meritorious, to 
usurp the place to which his name was so pre-eminently entitled 
in the geographical nomenclature of the globe. 

No one, however, who observes the course of things in our 
own land, if not in other lands, in regard to monuments and 
statues, can be surprised that the claims of Columbus should 
have been postponed. Shakspeare has portrayed the whole 



6 MASSACHUSETTS AND ITS EARLY HISTORY. 

philosophy of the matter, in that most impressive passage which 
he has put into the mouth of the not altogether reticent Ulysses 
of ancient Greece. You all remember it : — 

" Time hath, mj^ lord, a wallet at his back, 
Wherein he puts alms for oblivion, 
A great-sized monster of ingratitudes : 
Those scraps are good deeds past ; which are devour'd 
As fast as they are made, forgot as soon 
As done :..... 
One touch of nature makes the whole world kin, — 
That all, with one consent, praise new-born gawds, 
Though they are made and moulded of things past ; 
And give to dust, that is a little gilt, 
More laud than gilt o'er-dusted. 
The present eye praises the present object." 

How true is it, my friends, here and elsewhere, now as in 
Shakspeare's time, that the man who discovered a continent, or 
founded a great commonwealth, is postponed to some living hero, 
or to him who died but yesterday I For a time the heroes of our 
Revolution crowded out all commemoration of the Pilgrim or 
Puritan Fathers. Then came the heroes of a later war with 
England to crowd out the Revolutionary patriots. Next fol- 
lowed the heroes of the conquest of Mexico. More recently, 
the heroes and martyrs of our late civil war have absorbed 
all our sympathies and all our means. It is not unnatural; 
nor is it a subject for reproach or complaint, or for any thing 
but satisfaction. "We grudge no tribute, certainly, however 
costly, to those heroic young lives which were offered up so 
nobly for the recent rescue of the National Union. Yet it 
may be hoped that a day will still come, when America may have 
time to look back, even as far as Columbus ; and, coming down 
through the various stages of her early colonial settlement, and 
her later constitutional government, may provide some fit me- 
morials of the men to whom she has owed her rise and progress. 
It maybe hoped that a day will come, when Massachusetts may 
have leisure to examine that " wallet of oblivion at the back of 
Time," and to rescue from it some names and deeds of her own 
earlier and later history, which she would not willingly let die. 
It may be hoped that a day will come, when our own city may 
have time to review her roll of honor, and may realize that no 



MASSACHUSETTS AND ITS EARLY HISTORY. 7 

Campo Santo, or Santa Croce, or Pere la Chaise, or Westminster 
Abbey of the Old World, contains dust more precious, or more 
worthy of commemoration, than that which lies almost un- 
marked in some of her own ancient graveyards. I will men- 
tion but a single name ; that of the great minister of our first 
Puritan church, in honor of whose intended coming our city is 
said to have been called : — We sent, indeed, over the Atlantic, 
not many years since, a considerable sum of money to repair the 
little chapel of his noble church in Boston, Lincolnshire, Old 
England ; but there is nothing to tell the passer-by, unless he 
stoops over the mouldering stone with the microscope of an Old 
Mortality, where, in the Boston of New England, have reposed 
for two centuries the ashes of John Cotton. 

But the statue of Columbus was not the only thing I saw in 
Genoa, which awakened reflections and associations connected 
with my own land. I did not fail to grope my way through the 
old Historic Hall, with its double row of original portrait statues 
of the old Genoese nobles, formerly known as the Bank of St. 
George, but now desecrated to the use of the dingiest depart- 
ment of what, I should hope and believe, is the dingiest custom- 
house in the world. Heaven forbid, thought I, that any historic 
hall of my own land should ever suffer such a profanation. 
Yet when I remembered how inadequately cared for our own 
Faneuil Hall, and still more our own old State House, had often 
been ; and how much of their sanctity and of their safety had 
been sacrificed in years past, if they were not still, to any and 
every purpose which might increase the rents, and add a few 
more hundreds of dollars to a treasury from which so much goes 
out from year to year for more than doubtful expenditures, — I 
was less emboldened to indulge in any wholesale strictures upon 
other cities. But better, a thousand-fold better, let me say in 
passing, that all such structures, whether in Genoa or in Boston, 
should be razed to the ground at once, and live only as they are 
photographed on the hearts of those who have held them sacred, 
than that they should be left cumbering the ground and blocking 
the highway, only to signalize the more conspicuously that 
indifference and irreverence towards the noblest scenes and 
associations of a glorious past, which have been engendered by 
the rush and crush of modern improvement and modern traffic. 



8 MASSACHUSKTTS AND ITS EARLY HISTORY. 

But pardon me, my friends, for such a digression, and bear 
with me kindly as I roll rapidly again along the Riviera, resting 
at mid-day on the lofty hill at Rota, which commands so wonder- 
ful a view, and reaching Sestri di Ponente just in season to 
enjoy one of those indescribable Italian sunsets. The necessity 
of an early start, the next day, not only secured us an opportunity 
of witnessing what Jeremy Taylor had so vividly in mind when 
he quaintly recommended to the readers of his " Holy Living," 
that they should sometimes " be curious to see the preparations 
which the sun makes, when he is about to quit his chamber in 
the East;" but enabled us also to reach the summit of the last 
mountain on our route, in season to look down upon the lovely 
harbor of Spezia, just as the daystar was once more sinking 
beneath the blue waters of the Mediterranean, and casting those 
ineffable roseate hues upon the snow-capped Apennines in the 
distance, while at the same instant a full-orbed moon was 
rising majestically from behind them. A more delightful and 
inspiring view it has hardly entered into the imagination of poet 
or painter to conceive. Shall I be forgiven, however, for saying 
that there was an added beauty to that view, — to American 
eyes, certainly, — when we descried in the harbor below us, 
safely riding at anchor, and surrounded by its companions of 
the squadron, and surmounted by the stars and stripes, the same 
noble propeller, bearing the name of the " Great Bostonian," — 
Franklin, — which we had left at Nice, and which had come round 
there that very day ? I do not envy the apathy of any American, 
young or old, who can suddenly find himself face to face, in a 
foreign land, with the flag of his country, flying from the mast- 
head of one of its noblest frigates, and symbolizing more espe- 
cially the personal presence and authority of an admiral who 
went into action lashed to a mast-head himself, — I do not envy, 
I say, the composure of one who can confront that flag, under 
such circumstances, without emotion ; or, who would not con- 
sider any prospect, which sun and moon and azure waves and 
snow-capt hills combined can make up, as beautified and glorified 
by such an additional feature. 

The next morning, I found myself in the train with Farragut 
and his party, and went on with them to Pisa, where we all 
ascended " the tower which leans and leans and leans, but 



MASSACHUSETTS AND JTS EARLY HISTORY. 9 

never falls." On the following day, I was where I could read 
the inscription on the ancient residence of Americas Vespucius ; 
and where I was led to wish again, as I had more than once 
wished before, that Boston would follow the example of Florence, 
and so inscribe its local history on the names of its streets, and 
the walls of its houses, that it might be read by every boy and 
girl on their way to school. 

But what, you may well ask, my friends, what has all this to 
do with the course of historical lectures which I am here officially 
to introduce ? What has it all to do even with the apology 
which I proposed to offer you ? Not so much, perhaps, with 
either as might be wished, yet by no means so little as some 
of ray hearers may at first be disposed to think. For as I 
drove along that magnificent road, during those five or six 
days of superb weather, when sun and moon and each particular 
star would seem to have shed their selectest influence upon 
our pathway (and be it always borne in mind, that one may 
as well look for the beauties of a landscape while passing 
through a tunnel, as attempt to form any idea of the grandeur of 
the Corniche by traversing it in a fog or a storm), — as I drove 
along that marvellous road which, too soon, I fear, is to be 
abandoned for the greater despatch and economy of an already 
half-finished railroad, the letter of my friend Dr. Ellis, an- 
nouncing these lectures, and which had been opened as I entered 
the carriage, was fresh in my mind and frequently in my hand. 
I read it certainly more than once, or twice, or thrice ; and the 
subject to which it referred kept strangely blending itself with 
all I was observing and enjoying, entering unbidden alike into 
my thoughts by day and my dreams by night. As I gazed, at one 
moment, on the glorious sea at my side, and marked the match- 
less blueness of its waters ; and at another, on the gorgeous 
hues of sunrise, or of sunset, around and above me, fulfilling, 
as hardly anywhere else is so completely fulfilled, the exquisite 
idea of the Psalmist, — " Thou makest the outgoings of the morn- 
ing and the evening to rejoice;" — as I contemplated the varied 
luxuriance of the climate and the soil, where, on those last days 
of January and first days of February, the vine and the olive were 
still wearing their leafy honors side by side ; and oranges and 
lemons still ripening on the branches ; and the rose and the sweet 



10 MASSACHUSETTS AND ITS EARLY HISTORY. 

pea still blooming on the walls and in the gardens ; — as I 
inhaled that balmy air which made it a luxury to breathe; — as 
I turned to the thousand forms of beauty and of grandeur which 
greeted me from the distant hills and mountains, the Maritime 
Alps or Ligurian Apennines, with their robes of ice and diadems 
of snow : — all the while, old Massachusetts and its history and 
its Historical Society, and this very course of Lowell lectures, 
were still uppermost, or undermost, or somewhere in the midst of 
my thoughts, — sometimes in the way of comparison and some- 
times of contrast, sometimes of yearning and sometimes, I do 
confess, of dread. 

I could not help feeling, of course, that whatever else my 
native State might have to boast of, she had nothing in 
the way of sea, or sky, or soil, of climate or of scenery, to 
be compared for an instant with what I was beholding. I 
could not help contrasting the genial temperature and glowing 
atmosphere which I was enjoying, with the bleak winds and 
deep snows and drenching storms and freezing cold, which my 
fellow-citizens at home must have been at that moment endur- 
ing. And while I was thus meditating and musing, the fire 
kindled, and [ found myself seriously asking myself, whether I 
would permanently exchange, were it in my power to do so, such 
sea and sky and soil, as we have here in New England to-day, 
for those of southern France or central Italy ; and suddenly I 
found myself resolving, that if I should reach my home safely 
and in season, and should be called on to take either an opening 
or a closing part in this course of lectures, — ignorant, as I was, 
what other subjects might be left open to me, — I would give my 
reasons for saying no, — emphatically no, — to this question; 
and would devote my little hour to some thoughts on the influ- 
ences upon the character and career of our earlier and our later 
people, and on the supreme results to our history as a Common- 
wealth, of that very soil and climate about which we are so often 
disposed to complain, and of which my letters from home were 
at that moment saying, " that it was feared the Gulf Stream 
had changed its current, and that we might soon look out for 
polar bears and other arctic curiosities ! " And soon the subject 
and its treatment began to expand and shape itself in my mind. 
I bethought me that Massachusetts, too, had a sea of her own. 



MASSACHUSETTS AND ITS EARLY HISTORY. 11 

— an historical sea, if I may so speak ; that, indeed, she had 
risen out of the sea, that she could not have been Mas- 
sachusetts had she not been founded on the coast. And I 
followed that coast around, on the map of my memory, from the 
farthest point of Cape Cod, to which Captain John Smith, — one 
of the pioneers of New-England exploration, of whom my friend 
Hillard has given us so good a Life ; and who himself deserves a 
statue or a monument somewhere along shore, — attempted to 
affix the name of King James ; round to the extremest verge of 
Cape Ann, to which the same bold, though erratic — I had 
almost said vagabond — navigator essayed to give the portentous 
and not altogether musical title of Cape Tragabigzanda. I 
found myself pausing in this survey, as you will not doubt, to 
mark the spot in Provincetown Harbor, where, in the cabin of the 
" Mayflower," the first written Constitution known to the history 
of the world, was drawn up, agreed upon, and signed. I found 
myself pausing again, as you will not doubt, to mark the spot in 
Plymouth Harbor, where the Pilgrim Fathers left the " May- 
flower" at that terrible wintry season, and landed on that conse- 
crated rock. I found myself pausing once more, you may be sure, 
to mark the spot in the gentler waters which wash that charming 
Beverly shore in the harbor of Salem, where the " Arbella," with 
the charter of Massachusetts, and its governor and company, 
came to anchor ten years later. Nor did I altogether forget the 
little islands on which Bartholomew Gosnold had landed and 
built a house, before Puritan or Pilgrim, or even John Smith, had 
ventured within our bay. And then there came over me a more 
vivid impression than ever before, of all that that bay, with the 
great ocean of which it is an inlet, had done for the character 
and enterprise and industry of our people, from those early days 
to this. I bethought me of those whale-fisheries, of which it had 
been the cradle and the nursery, and which elicited that well- 
remembered and magnificent tribute of Edmund Burke, in his 
speech on conciliation with America, — a tribute, which, at the 
end of nearly a hundred years, cannot be read without stirring 
our blood like a trumpet, and which is worthy of being read 
and re-read, as a piece of glorious prose which neither Macaulay 
nor Milton often, if ever, surpassed: — 



12 MASSACHUSETTS AND ITS EARLY HISTORY. 

" Look at the manner in which the people of New England," said 
Burke, " have of late carried on the whale-fishery. Whilst we follow 
them among the tumbling mountains of ice, and behold them penetrating 
into the deepest frozen recesses of Hudson's Bay and Davis's Straits, 
whilst we are looking for them beneath the arctic circle, we hear that 
they have pierced into the opposite region of polar cold, that they are at 
the antipodes, and engaged under the frozen serpent of the South. Falk- 
land Island, which seemed too remote and romantic an object for the grasp 
of rational ambition, is but a stage and resting-ijlace in the progress of 
their victorious industry. Nor is the equinoctial heat more discouraging 
to them, than the accumulated winter of both the poles. We know that 
whilst some of them draw the line and strike the harpoon on the coast of 
Africa, others run the longitude, and pursue their gigantic game along the 
coast of Brazil. No sea but what is vexed by their fisheries. No 
climate that is not witness to their toils. Neither the perseverance of 
Holland, nor the activity of France, nor the dexterous and firm sagacity 
of English enterprise, ever carried this most perilous mode of hardy 
industry to the extent to which it has been pushed by this recent people ; 
a people who are still, as it were, but in the gristle, and not yet hard- 
ened into the bone of manhood." 

I bethought me, too, of the cod fisheries which our bay had 
nourished and cherished, until they became at one time so far 
the very staple of our Commonwealth, that their emblem, — as I 
have the best reason for remembering, — was suspended, where it 
still hangs, over the chair of the presiding officer of the represen- 
tatives of the people in our legislative halls. I bethought me, 
again, of the mercantile marine it had built up, until Salem 
became one of the great seats of the East-India trade ; and 
Captain Robert Gray, of Boston, discovered the Columbia River; 
and Boston itself rose to be the third, — as it not long ago was, 
I know not where it stands now, — while New Bedford was hardly 
less than the fifth, in the commercial tonnage of the Union. Nor, 
certainly, did I fail to remember what our bay and our sea had 
done for the national navy, and the thousands of gallant tars it 
had supplied for fighting their country's battles on the ocean, — 
whether under Bainbridge and Lawrence and Chauncey and Hull 
and Decatur, in those days when George Canning declared, in the 
House of Commons, that " the spell of British invincibility on the 
ocean was at last broken ; " or in these latter days of not inferior 
glory, under Porter and Rodgers and Winslow and Foote and Far- 



MASSACHUSETTS AND ITS EARLY HISTORY. 13 

ragut. Was this a sea, I asked myself, to be disowned, or abandoned, 
or exchanged for any other sea beneath the sun ? It was no Medi- 
terranean, indeed. It did not run between vine-clad hills and 
romantic villages ; and one could hardly sail an hour upon it, in 
a straight course, without leaving capes and headlands and snug 
harbors behind him, and going out to buffet with the big rollers 
and swelling billows of the vast Atlantic, with nothing but the 
sea and the sky, and the God above the sky, to witness the en- 
counter. But, for this very reason, it was a sea to impart the 
bravery it demanded ; to stimulate the adventure it invited ; and 
to breed and educate, as it has bred and educated, a race of hardy 
and intrepid mariners, taking to the water, — as Dr. Palfrey once 
so happily said, — as naturally as so many ducks to a pond ; whose 
enterprise and exploits have supplied, and are still destined to 
supply, the theme of solid history, as well as of brilliant romance, 
to the end of time ; mariners of New England, who are as worthy 
of being famous in song and story, as those mariners of Old Eng- 
land, whose memories are embalmed in the immortal song of 
Campbell. 

And then I bethought me of the climate of Massachusetts, 
which had so marvellously co-operated with the sea, in giving 
vigor and energy and hardihood to our people. True, we had 
no Januarys or Februarys like those I was experiencing. True, 
our winters were almost always long and dreary and dreadful, 
and our summers too often brief and scorching. A glorious 
autumn we might generally boast of, kindling our forests into a 
thousand glories, as the inexorable Frost King blazes his path- 
way through the valleys and along the hill-sides, in colors such as 
never adorned the train of any other earthly monarch : but we 
have had recent experience that even this cannot be counted on ; 
while as to spring, — why, if our poet Bryant had seen fit to vie 
with Thomson, — as I think he might have done, — and to depict 
the Seasons of New England, he could have done nothing but 
include spring in a parenthesis. 

Yet, would I alter all this ? Would I, if the wand of Prospero, 
to lay or lift a tempest, were in my hand, exchange even our 
Boston east wind, eager and nipping as it is, for some sweet but 
treacherous south, breathing, indeed, over a bank of violets, but 
bringing in its track the lassitude, the self-indulgence, the aver- 



14 MASSACHUSETTS AND ITS EARLY HISTORY. 

sion to labor, the inaptitude for liberty, the incapacity for self- 
government, or for sustained and manly effort of any sort, which 
characterize so many of the inhabitants of those sunny climes 
through which I was then passing? Admit that our east wind 
may have imparted not a little of its harsh and acrid quality to 
the tempers of those who first weathered it, which has not been 
wholly eradicated, which perhaps never can be eradicated, from 
the tempers of their descendants; for I am disposed to think, 
that the acrid quality of the climate was, in part at least, pri- 
marily responsible for creating that " acrid spirit of the times," 
which Longfellow tells us, at the close of one of his graceful 
New-England tragedies, "corroded the true steel" of one of the 
earliest and bravest of the old Puritan leaders. But what other 
climate could have given them the muscle, the grit, the gristle (as 
Burke called it), the strong right arms, and the stern and dauntless 
souls, which enabled them to endure the deprivations of a wil- 
derness, and to subdue a soil which would have repelled and 
defied all feebler hands or hearts ? 

And, next, I bethought me of that soil : What a soil it was, here 
in New England, what a soil it is still, compared with that then 
beneath my feet ! And I remembered but too vividly the dreary 
and desolate look of a Massachusetts landscape for six or seven 
months of the year, not only without fruit or flowers, like those 
which were on all sides around me, but without a spire of grass 
or a leaf on the trees. But I remembered, too, a little dialogue 
which I had once heard from the lips of Edward Everett. 
Would that those lips had language still, and could repeat it, in 
their own inimitable way, once more I He "was accompanying 
Henry Clay, during the month of April, 1 think it was in the 
year 1833, through the county of Middlesex, which Mr. Everett 
then represented in Congress, on a visit to Lowell. " Everett," 
exclaimed Mr. Clay, " in Heaven's name, what do your constit- 
uents live on ? I see nothing hereabouts capable of supporting 
human life, or animal life of any sort." " Why, Mr. Clay," re- 
plied Everett, " don't you see that tree in the middle of yonder 
field there ? " " Yes, I do," said Mr. Clay ; « and a very small 
and miserable specimen of a tree it is ; there is not a leaf or a bud 
on it ; it looks dead already, and hardly fit for firewood." " Ah ! " 
said Mr. Everett (in playful resentment of an old impertinence 



MASSACHUSETTS AND ITS EARLY HISTORY. 15 

to a neighboring New-England State), " it makes capital wooden 
nutmegs!" Yes, my friends, the barrenness of our ground has 
made our brains fertile; and even the invention which built up 
Lowell, has owed not a little of its stimulus to the sterility of the 
surrounding acres. The willing and luxuriant harvests of other 
latitudes, are, indeed, unknown to us ; but who shall complain of 
a soil which has so enforced industry ; which has so quickened and 
sharpened the wits ; which has so nourished independence and 
freedom ; which has presented no temptation to make woman a 
yoke-fellow with the brutes, exhibiting her, like those I saw around 
me, subjected to the hardest labors of the field ; and which, above 
all, — far, far above all, — has so repelled and repudiated from its 
culture every form of human servitude ! Boast as we will, and 
as we well may, of the influence of free schools and free govern- 
ments in moulding and training the characters and careers of 
New-England men, — and my friend, Mr. Emerson, will tell you 
all about that, when his turn to lecture comes, — we must not for- 
get that there are influences underlying and overlying all these, 
— the influences of the earth beneath us and of the sky above us. 
One of the most popular of Old England's poets, even in the very 
piece in which he proposed to illustrate the influence of education 
and government upon mankind, — a piece which, though fragmen- 
tary and unfinished, is not unworthy to stand beside his own 
exquisite elegy in a country churchyard, — has given expression to 
this idea in some noble lines : — 

" Not but the human fabric from the birth 
Imbibes the flavor of its parent earth ; 
As various tracts enforce a various toil, 
The majiners speak the idiom of their soil. 
An iron race the mountain-cliffs maintain, 
Foes to the gentler genius of the plain." 

One might almost imagine, in(h^ed, that Gray had New England, 
and New-England men, distinctly in his mind, when he adds : — 

"For where unwearied sinews must be found 
With side-long plough to quell the flinty ground, 
To turn the torrent's swift-descending flood, 
To brave the savage rushing from the wood, — 
What wonder if, to i)atient valor train'd, 
They guard with spirit wliat by strength they gain'd 1 " 



16 MASSACHUSETTS AND ITS EARLY HISTORY. 

And you all remember that good, dear, pious Mrs. Barbauld 
has condensed the whole thought into one of the grandest coup- 
lets in all poetry : — 

" Man is the nobler growth our realms supply, 
And souls are ripened in our, northern sky." 

Yes, my friends', we of New England, after all, may well thank 
Heaven that our Pilgrim Fathers landed upon nothing softer 
than a rock, and that the Puritan founders of Massachusetts were 
not persuaded, — as Oliver Cromwell endeavored to persuade 
them, and would fain have forced them, had he dared to try it, — 
to abandon their flinty glebe for the rich mould of the tropics. It 
is not enough for us to be grateful, that the region to which they 
so firmly adhered, was not a region exposed to such inundations 
as have recently devastated so many of the fields and villages 
of Switzerland, and made such a claim upon the sympathy and 
succor of all who have witnessed the glories of the Alps, and the 
simple virtues of those who inhabit them. It is not enough for 
us to be grateful, that the clime to which they clung so tena- 
ciously, is not a clime subject to such convulsions as have recently 
swallowed up whole cities on our own hemisphere ; and the mere 
liability to which is itself sufficient to unnerve and demoralize 
even those who may escape all actual damage to person or 
property. It is not enough for us to be grateful, that the bay 
around which they nestled and clustered, had no smouldering 
volcano on its right hand or on its left, threatening at every 
outbreak, like Vesuvius or ^tna at this moment, to over- 
whelm all within its reach with a torrent of burning lava. It is 
not enough for us to be grateful, that the land and the sea which 
they refused so obstinately to abandon or exchange, were free 
alike from the corrupting and distracting influences of mines of 
silver or of gold, and of fisheries of coral or of pearl ; though 
I may not forget that, in these latter years, some of our not 
very distant hills have occasionally been suspected of gold, 
and that a few exquisite pearls have actually been found, in 
the streams near Sandwich, not far from where the Pilgrims 
landed. But, beyond and above all this, may we not well thank 
God, as we review our history, even for that springless climate, 
of short summers and long winters, of late and early frosts. 



MASSACHUSETTS AND ITS EARLY HISTORY. 17 

of sharp and sudden vicissitudes, which has demanded, from 
first to last, the steady and sturdy struggle of intellig 'nt free- 
men for existence and for bread ? May we not well thank God 
for a soil, from which no North-western Ordinance or Missouri 
Compromise, no Wilmot Proviso or Constitutional Amendment, 
was ever needed to shut oat slavery ; and for a temperature 
which has braced up our children to a manly, vigorous, indepen- 
dent, self-sustaining, and self-relying exercise of their own tiiews 
and sinews and brains in every field of useful labor or worthy 
enterprise ? 

Who is not willing to unite with me in exclaiming, in this sense 
at least, — Let Massachusetts be " left out in the cold " for ever, 
with nothing but ice and granite for her natural exports, rather 
than have all the manhood melted and thawed out of her children, 
as it was out of so many of those Avhom I saw by the way-side, too 
limp for any thing but to bask in the sun and beg? Who can 
say that upon a different soil, and under other skies, even New- 
England principles, as we call them, would have been proof 
against the temptation of establishing, or at least permanently 
tolerating, domestic institutions which have been so fatal else- 
where, and which it has cost at last such a deluge of blood and 
treasure to abolish ? Who can say that if the pilot of the 
Pilgrims, to whom, justly or unjustly, treachery has sometimes 
been imputed, had conducted the Mayflower nearer to the 
Southern Cross, instead of steering her ever by that blessed 
North Star; and if the Massachusetts colony had followed in 
their wake, — we, their descendants, might not at this moment 
be suffering, as so many of our brethren elsewhere are suffering, 
from the destitution and desolation, directly or indirectly brought 
upon ourselves, by a vain struggle, in the interests and under the 
influence of slavery, to overthrow that National Government, 
and rend asunder that Constitutional Union, which it is now 
our pride and glory to have defended and preserved for our 
children ? 

Such, my friends, were some of the thoughts, on the influence 
of soil and climate upon the character and history of New Eng- 
land, which came swarming through my mind as I whirled along 
that magnificent Corniche road last winter, with the letter of my 
friend Dr. Ellis in my hand. Such were the leading ideas of the 

2 



18 MASSACHUSETTS AND ITS EARLY HISTORY. 

lecture I then conceived, and proposed to prepare deliberately, if 
I should be called on to prepare any thing, for this occasion; and 
which I thought might be worked up into a not altogether inap- 
propriate Introductory to such a course. But a thousand unfore- 
seen circumstances of foreign travel, and of domestic and per- 
sonal experience, soon occurred to obliterate the whole subject 
from my mind ; and I returned home, not long ago, without ever 
thinking of it again, and without a note on which I could rely 
for reviving and reconstructing the train of ideas. And all 
that I have been able to do, since my return, has been to recall 
thus hastily the associations of time and place, to gather up the 
tangled threads wherever I could lay hold of them in my memory, 
and to present to you thus crudely, what I would so gladly have 
elaborated, illustrated, and perfected. If, however, by throwing 
myself into the gap, — as I have done, at the last moment, and at 
the imperative call of others, — I shall have prepared the way for 
the instructive and well-considered and eloquent discourses which 
I know are to follow, my hour will not have been spent in vain ; 
and you, I am sure, will all pardon me for so desultory and dis- 
cursive an utterance. 

I must not let you go, however, without reverting, in a few 
closing remarks, to the original purpose of these lectures, and to 
the general objects of the Society under whose auspices they 
have been undertaken. There is something remarkable, and 
more than remarkable, — there is something quite wonderful, I 
think, — about the way in which the history of this old Common- 
wealth of ours, and the history of New England, of which it 
was the capital colony, have been preserved, cared for, and 
"treasured up as for a life beyond life," from the very outset of 
their career. Not only are we spared the pains of seeking the 
story of our origin in myths and fables, in traditions and 
legends, like the people of so many other lands, but we may find 
it written out for us at the moment, by those who could tell us 
all that they saw, and a most important part of which they 
were. 

Hardly had the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth in 1620, before 
William Bradford, who was so soon to succeed the lamented 
Carver as their governor, began to collect the original letters 
and papers, which, ten years afterwards, he commenced "piecing 



MASSACHUSETTS AND ITS EARLY HISTORY. 19 

up at times of leisure" (to use his own phrase), until he had 
completed a connected and careful account of the first twenty- 
seven years of that pioneer plantation. This invaluable work, 
— after remaining in manuscript for more than two hundred 
years, known only by a few citations which had been made from 
it by later writers, who had enjoyed the privilege of consulting 
it, — after having disappeared from all view, and eluded all 
search, for more than half a century; and after having been 
lamented over like one of the lost books of Livy — to us, if 
not to the world at large, a thousand times more precious than 
the whole of Livy, — was at last discovered in 1855, on the other 
side of the Atlantic Ocean, in the library of the Bishop of 
London at Fulham, and was printed for the first time, by this 
Society, in 1856, froiu an exact copy made for the purpose, under 
the faithful editorship of our present accomplished Recording Sec- 
retary, Mr. Charles Deane. 

On the other hand, the Massachusetts Company proper, w^ith 
their charter, had not left their final anchorage at the Cowes, 
near the Isle of Wight, in 1630, before the governor of that 
colony (John Winthrop) had made the first entry in a journal or 
history, which he continued from day to day, and from year to 
year, until his death in 1648-9. That work, too, remained in 
perishable manuscript for a century and a half. The original 
was in three volumes; the two first of which were printed, for 
the first time, at Hartford, in 1790, from an inaccurate copy, which 
had been commenced by Governor Trumbull, with a preface 
and dedication by the great lexicographer, Noah Webster, who 
subsequently confessed that he had never even read the original 
manuscript. It remained for one whom we now recognize, since 
the death of our veteran Quincy, as the venerable senior mem- 
ber of our Society, and its former President (James Savage), to 
decipher and annotate and edit the whole ; for lo ! in 1816, 
the third volume, of which nothing had been seen or heard for 
more than sixty years, turned up in the tower of the Old South 
Meeting-house! The Rev. Thomas Prince, the pastor of that 
church, who kept his library in that tower, and is known to have 
had all three of the volumes in 1755, died without returning this 
third volume to the family of the author, from whom I have the 
best reason to think they were all borrowed. And so in 1825-6, 



20 MASSACHUSETTS AND ITS EARLY HISTORY. 

one hundred and ninety-five years after that first entry, on that 
Easter Monday, while the " Arbella " was " riding at the Cowes," 
these annals of the first nineteen years of the Massachusetts 
colony were published in a correct and complete form. But as 
if to illustrate the risks to which they had been so long exposed, 
and to signalize the perils they had so providentially escaped, 
one of the original volumes was destroyed by a memorable fire 
in Court Street, before Mr. Savage had finished the laborious 
corrections and annotations to which he had devoted himself. 

Here, then, we find the striking fact of the two governors of 
the two originally independent colonies of Plymouth and Mas- 
sachusetts Bay, which afterwards, in 1691, were combined in a 
single Commonwealth, — the two men who were the leading 
witnesses of all that occurred, and the leading actors in all that 
was done, — preparing careful histories of the rise and prog- 
ress of each, and leaving them in manuscript at their death : 
Those manuscripts we find remaining unprinted, uncopied, and 
seemingly uncared for, during a period of a century and a half 
and two centuries respectively ; exposed to all and more than all 
the common accidents which wait upon ancient papers, — the 
moth, the bookworm, the damp, the flames, — owing to the un- 
settled and troubled condition of the colonies, from time to time, 
and almost all the time: For instance, when the British cavalry 
occupied the Old South Church, as a riding-school and a stable, 
in 1775, and took Governor Winthrop's old house (which stood 
next) for firewood, both of these precious manuscripts were in 
the tower, where Prince had left them ; and both were doomed, 
to all human eyes, to be used as kindling; but they were really 
destined for another sort of kindling: Both of them we find re- 
appearing in the end, — substantially every leaf of them ; — one 
of them, and a large part of the other, turning up at last where 
they would least have been looked for, or have been imagined to 
be ; and both of them waiting, — waiting, as it were, for the ful- 
ness of time, — to be published, as they have been, by those most 
capable of appreciating them and doing them justice. 

What is there in the curiosities of secular literature more 
striking I Surely, we may say, so far as Massachusetts history 
is concerned, " There's a divinity that shapes our ends, rough- 
hew them how we will." But this is but the beginning of the 



MASSACHUSETTS AND ITS EARLY HISTORY. 21 

story. While these original and more authentic accounts of 
the infant Commonwealth were still scarcely known to exist be- 
yond the family circle of their authors, — as early as 1654, — 
Edward Johnson, one of the intensest of Puritans, publishes in 
London, his " Wonder-working Providence of Sion's Saviour in 
New England," w^hich, though written in a most inflated and 
bombastic style, and full of blunders and doggerel, contains many 
most important and valuable facts, and is worthy of being remem- 
bered as the first printed book of New-England history. A beau- 
tiful edition of it, with a valuable Introduction, has recently been 
published by Mr. W. F. Poole, the late faithful Librarian of the 
Boston Athenffium. Then came Nathaniel Morton, a nephew of 
Governor Bradford, with his " Memorial of Plymouth Colony," 
abounding, also, in important references to the Massachusetts 
Colony proper, published originally at our Cambridge in 1669, 
and republished in 1826, under the admirable editorship of another 
former President of this Society, — the late excellent Judge 
Davis. 

And now "draws hitherward, — I know him by his stride," — 
the giant of New-England early literature, — the marvellous and 
marvel-loving Cotton Mather, with a voracity for every thing re- 
lating to our colonial condition and history as insatiate as his 
own vanity ; seeking and searching for something new and 
strange, like those men of ancient Athens whom Paul depicted ; 
of a credulity which swallowed every thing which was told him, 
and a diligence which digested almost every thing which he swal- 
lowed ; and publishing, in London, in 1702, after a prodigious 
amount of stragglings and wrestlings, of prayers and fastings, of 
visions by day and dreams by night, a huge folio volume, en- 
titled " Magnalia Christi Americana," or, as the titlepage has it, 
" The First book of the New-English History, reporting the De- 
sign whereo??, the Manner wherein, and the People whereby, the 
several Colonies of New England were planted, by the endeavour 
of Cotton Mather;" — containing a monstrous mass of informa- 
tion and speculation, of error and gossip, of biography and his- 
tory, of italics and capitals, of classical quotations, Latin and 
Greek, and of original epitaphs, Latin and English, in prose 
and in verse, which, as old Polonius said of Hamlet's actors, 
" either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical. 



22 MASSACHUSETTS AND ITS EARLY HISTORY. 

historical-pastoral, tragical-comical, scene individable or poem 
unlimited," has hardly a parallel in the world. Let me not seem 
to disparage or undervalue Cotton Mather, — a perfect Dr. Pan- 
gloss, as he was in many particulars, — for with all his foibles 
and all his faults, all his credulity and all his vanity, it cannot be 
denied that he did a really great work for New-England history. 
The lives of our Worthies could not have been written without 
him ; while his " Essay to do Good " is known to have given the 
earliest incentive to the wonderful career of New England's 
most wonderful son, — Benjamin Franklin. 

Passing rapidly now over Church's " King Philip's War," 
first printed in 1716, of which a beautiful edition has re- 
cently been added to "the New-England Library " by the Rev. 
Henry Martyn Dexter; and John Dunton's "Letters from New 
England," in 1686, just printed for the Prince Society, from the 
original manuscript in the Bodleian Library, under the careful 
editorship of Mr. W. H. Whitmore, — we come next, in order of 
date, to the " Chronological History of New England" by the accu- 
rate and indefatigable Thomas Prince himself, whose first volume 
was published in 1736 ; and, who in 1755, began a second volume, 
of which only three serial numbers were printed before his death, 
in 1758. Then we have the valuable historical " Summary" of 
Dr. William Douglas, published in Boston, in numbers, the first 
of them in 1746-7 ; and the whole two volumes of which Avere 
completed in 1751. 

And now appears upon the scene, as an historian of Massa- 
chusetts, another of her colonial governors, whose name was so 
identified, justly or unjustly, with the Stamp Act, and others of 
those acts of British oppression which drove us to rebellion, and 
through rebellion to independence, that it long was held in too 
much of passionate abhorrence to allow of any justice being 
done to any thing he did or said or wrote ; but who, take him 
for all in all, did as much for the history of this his native State, 
and did it as well, as any man who has lived before or since. 
Let us not fail to do justice to his memory in this respect. 
Governor Hutchinson's first volume was published in 1764. 
The second volume, almost ready for the press, was in his house 
in Garden-Court Street, on the 26th of August, 1765, when it 
was so shamefully sacked and pillaged by a mol). Hutchinson, 



MASSACHUSETTS AND ITS EARLY HISTORY. 23 

as the mob apjjroached, was engaged in bearing to a place of 
safety a beloved daughter who had refused to quit his side, and 
was thus compelled to abandon his precious papers to their fate. 
Every thing was destroyed, or thrown out of the windows ; and 
the scattered pages of this second volume of his history were 
left lying in the street for several hours in a soaking rain. But 
thanks to the care and pains of the Rev. Dr. John Eliot, one of 
the servants, then and always, of the good God to whom we owe 
the marvellous preservation of those other and earlier manu- 
scripts of those other and earlier governors, all but eight or ten 
sheets were collected and saved ; and so much of them was still 
legible that, in spite of the muddy footprints of the Vandals who 
had trampled on them, the author was able to supply the rest, 
transcribe the whole, and publish it in 1767. Still a third volume, 
hardly less valuable than either, and written with an almost judi- 
cial fairness and a wonderful freedom from prejudice, consider- 
ing the treatment he had received, reraainet' in manuscript for 
half a century after his death in 1780, and was only rescued from 
perdition, and published in 1828, through the persevering efforts 
of Mr. Savage, and other members of our Society. 

I must not forget that still another governor of Massachusetts, 
James Sullivan, the first President of our Society, early devoted 
his leisure from professional and public labors to the preparation 
of a history of his native Province of Maine, — then a part of 
Massachusetts, — and published it in 1795. I must not forget 
the excellent account of that great epoch in Massachusetts his- 
tory, commonly called " Shays's Rebellion," published in 1788 by 
George Richards Minot (the father of our venerable William) ; 
and followed, in 1798 and 1803, by two substantial volumes of 
the history of the province, from 1748 to 1765. I must not for- 
get either the really great work of one Avho was so long our 
Corresponding Secretary, and whose accomplished son, — who so 
well illustrates the idea of ancient mythology, " one power of 
physic, melody, and song" — is announced among the lecturers 
of our course ; I mean the " American Annals " of the late Dr. 
Abiel Holmes, published in 1805, and abounding in dates and 
facts of Massachusetts and New England, as well as of National 
interest. Still less must I forget the elaborate History of New 
England, by the Rev. William Hubbard, an early minister of 



24 MASSACHUSETTS AND ITS EARLY HISTORY. 

Ipswich, comjjleted in manuscript as long ago as 1682, but which 
it remained for this Society, with the patronage of the Legislature 
of Massachusetts, to publish for the first time as lately as 1815. 

Time would fail me, or certainly your patience would be ex- 
hausted, my friends, were I to attempt to speak, as I ought to 
speak, of all the more recent contributions and contributors to 
the historical illustration of our Commonw^ealth, and of New 
England ; of the Rev. John Eliot, and of Alden Bradford ; of 
Dr. Felt's Ecclesiastical History, and Governor Washburn's 
Judicial History ; of Drake's comprehensive and elaborate 
History of Boston ; of Quincy's Harvard University ; of Young's 
Chronicles of Plymouth and of Massachusetts, and of the 
Records of those old Colonies, edited by our worthy Mayor, Dr. 
ShurtlefF; of Mr. Savage's Genealogical History of New Eng- 
land ; of Tudor's James Otis ; of Richard Frothingham's Siege of 
Boston, and Life of Warren ; of Sabine's Fisheries and Loyal- 
ists; of Dr. Holland's Western Massachusetts, and General 
Schouler's Massachusetts in the late Civil War, with its 
admirable portrait of the lamented Andrew, and its vivid 
presentment of many of the stirring scenes through which we 
have so lately passed ; of the Life and Letters of John Adams 
by his distinguished grandson ; of Barry's Massachusetts ; of 
Bancroft's Colonial Period ; of Upham's recent and most inter- 
esting History of Witchcraft ; and of Palfrey's consummate and 
crowning work on New^ England, which may fitly complete 
the calendar, and which is worthy, I need not say, of far more 
than any mere passing commendation of mine. 

I have omitted, I doubt not, in this running catalogue, many 
names which deserve to be mentioned ; and I have said nothing 
of what has been done so well, in their Collections and Registers, 
by our sister societies of other States, and by kindred associations 
in our own State; or of the numerous town histories, and church 
histories, which have been so faithfully written. But I have said 
enough to recall to your remembrance the fact, that while New 
England has furnished not a few able and brilliant historians 
and biographers for some of the great political and literary epochs 
of other lands, ancient and modern, and for some of the great 
statesmen of other parts of our own land, — in our lamented 
Prescott and Sparks and Felron, and in our living Ticknor and 



MASSACHUSETTS AND ITS EARLY HISTORY. 25 

Motley and Parkman and Kirk, — her own history has by no 
means been neglected ; but that there has been a most striking 
succession of men, — many of them governors, judges, ministers, 
counsellors, men of renown, famous in their generation, — who 
have been moved, as by a common impulse, to keep the record of 
New England, and of Massachusetts in particular, and to illus- 
trate the history of their rise and progress; some of whose 
works, like those of William Bradford and John Winthrop and 
Thomas Hutchinson, have come down to us under circumstances 
of almost romantic interest ; and all of which together can hardly 
fail to leave the impression on a thoughtful mind, — I will not 
admit that it need be a superstitious mind, — that for good or for 
evil, for encouragement or for warning, for our glory or for our 
shame, that history was not destined to be lost to mankind. 

But I could not be forgiven, — I could not forgive myself, — 
were I to close without an allusion to one other name, which I 
have purposely reserved to the last, — the name of the Rev. Dr. 
Jeremy Belknap, the recognized founder of our Society, whose 
History of New Hampshire, in three volumes, published in 
1784, 1791, and 1792, and his two volumes of early American 
biography, published in 1794 and 1798, are full of importance 
to the work of which I have been speaking. Under his 
lead, our Society was organized in 1791, — to gather up the 
fragments, that nothing be lost, — composed of ten members, 
at the outset, increased to thirty, and afterwards to sixty in all, 
and now limited to a hundred members throughout the Common- 
wealth. Beginning their career upon the most economical scale; 
ordering their Treasurer, Judge Tudor, to buy " twelve Windsor 
green elbow-chairs, a plain pine table, painted, with a drawer 
and lock and key, and an inkstand ; " and with no resources but 
an assessment of two dollars a year upon each member, — they 
proceeded to collect papers and pamphlets and books, and to 
publish, scrap by scrap, as an appendix or a preamble to a maga- 
zine called " The American Apollo," whatever original manu- 
scripts, relating to New England, they were able to pick up ; 
the very first of these scraps having been published on the 6th 
of January, 1792, just seventy-six years ago to-morrow. In 
these latter years, the liberal and noble benefactions of Samuel 
Appleton and Thomas Dowse and George Peabody have added 



26 MASSACHUSETTS AND ITS EARLY HISTORY. 

greatly to their library and to their funds, and have enabled them 
to go on with their work more conspicuously and more confi- 
dently. But the enormous cost of printing, and the inadequate 
sale of their volumes, are serious impediments to their progress ; 
and this very course of lectures has been arranged, as a labor of 
love on the part of the members, not without at least a secondary 
view to eking out the insufficiencies of our treasury. 

Forty-five volumes of Collections and Proceedings have already 
been printed, — many of them containing papers of unspeakable 
importance and interest ; and some of them throwing a light upon 
the formation of our institutions, the establishment of our towns 
and schools, and the inner life of the earlier and later settlers of 
New England, which can be found nowhere else. Other papers 
of equal interest and value are awaiting the press. Without any 
very large addition to our resources, if it were only secured before 
some of our members, now in my eye, but whose names I forbear 
to mention, shall have lost the taste and the faculty for this sort 
of labor, our valuable manuscripts might be printed, and placed 
beyond the reach of accident, as fast as is desirable. And it is 
easy to suggest a legitimate and effectual mode of relief, — in the 
wider circulation and sale of our Collections, — if we could only 
accomplish its adoption. We cannot hope, indeed, that our 
volumes will find any great number of purchasers or readers, in 
competition with the illustrated poems or sensation novels, of 
which the tenth or the twentieth thousand are advertised in suc- 
cessive months. But there are more than three hundred towns in 
Massachusetts. In the public or social libraries of every one of 
them, there ought to be a complete set, or as complete a set as is 
still possible, of these Historical Collections. Everywhere we 
observe liberal men, residents or natives of these towns, found- 
ing, or endowing, or aiding these public libraries. If we could 
find enough of sucli liberal men, who, severally or jointly, would 
be responsible for placing sets of these Collections in only one- 
half of the town libraries, — and I know not what more appropriate 
New- Year's present could be made by any one to the place of 
his nativity, or of his winter or summer residence, — I should 
feel the greatest confidence, that we and our successors could go 
on, without let or hindrance, to continue the story of this noble 
Commonwealth in all its earlier, and in all its later, relations to 



MASSACHUSETTS AND ITS EARLY HISTORY. 27 

New England and to the nation at large, — "nothing extenuating, 
nor setting down aught in malice," but giving the truth, the 
whole truth, and nothing but the truth, after the manner and ex- 
ample of those who have preceded us. 

It is a work, ray friends, which, you will all agree with me 
ought not to be left incomplete. We owe it to the memory of 
our fathers, that no authentic account of their lives and labors 
should be lost. We owe it to our children, that the great ex- 
amples of piety and purity, of endurance and enterprise, of 
wisdom and patriotism and heroism, with which our earlier and 
our later annals abound, should be handed down to them in all 
the exactness of contemporaneous records. We owe it to our- 
selves not to be behindhand, at this day of our prosperity and 
abundance, in doing our share towards completing a history, which 
so many good and great men, under so many disadvantages and 
discouragements, have labored at so lovingly and so successfully, 
and which would almost seem to have been watched over from 
the beginning by a higher than human Power. 



1 



J 



I 



